Sept. 13 1967: Premier W.A.C Bennett waves to the crowd after a plaque with his name was unveiled at the dam bearing is name. The premier predicted project would be of enormous benefit to all Canadians.
/ PNG

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British Columbia was born in the midst of controversy over a resources megaproject 150 years ago.

And, as is evident from protests now fulminating over a proposed northern pipeline intended to carry unrefined bitumen from Alberta’s oilsands to tidewater and tanker transhipment to China, megaprojects continue to provide a crucible for strong opinions and political turbulence.

We’ve had protests in the past about megaprojects, from hydroelectricity grids to schemes to liquidate old-growth forests and replace them with “fibre farms.” Pulp mills, ferries, parks, the Winter Olympics, ski resorts, Expo 86, salmon fishing, coal mines, oil tankers, ports and perimeter roads have all galvanized both proponents and opponents and the clash has generated intense public scrutiny.

Some projects generated the wealth that made possible the society we share today; a society that for all its warts, flaws and injustices nevertheless provides the schools, universities, art galleries, hospitals and public infrastructure — roads, electric light, clean water, sanitation — that too many of us take for granted but which have enormously improved the lives of even the most marginalized.

Few would want to return to the “good old days” of lethal epidemics, widespread illiteracy, the ignorance that breeds xenophobia and racism, the isolation that breeds parochialism, and oppressive and exploitative corporatism. All these were ameliorated by megaprojects that built roads, electrified rural B.C., increased wages and living standards, and funded public health and education infrastructure.

To be sure, some also proved ill-conceived, wound up costing taxpayers vast sums and left those who inherited the environmental consequences scratching their heads and wondering, “What on earth were they thinking?”

For example, a commercial whaling industry that extirpated most large cetaceans from B.C.’s Strait of Georgia in the late 19th century in exchange for minuscule profits now seems an exercise in certifiable insanity.

On the other hand, in 1995, more than a thousand square kilometres of B.C.’s coastline was contaminated by toxic industrial effluents that poisoned crabs, prawns, oysters and shrimp. Today, as a result of loud and noisy protests and in spite of equally loud denials by industry, pollution has fallen dramatically and area closures are half what they were 15 years ago.

So, while proponents of megaprojects are still prone to denounce protests from opponents as obstructionist, negative NIMBYISM, there really is little defensible argument against the intense public scrutiny that critics apply to fulsome promises of benefit.

The bigger the project, the larger and more long-term the potential consequences, the more scrutiny any proposal deserves. We need to get these things right, whether they are pipelines across northern B.C., the Site C dam on the Peace River, fish farm pathogens affecting wild salmon, biodiversity in the forest industry, sustainable fisheries or tanker traffic through dangerous waters.

Some megaprojects are transformative by nature. The creation of BC Hydro and the electrification of the province still shape our everyday lives. Expo 86, once vehemently opposed, drew 22 million visitors and changed forever Vancouver’s conception of itself. The 2010 Winter Olympics drew strong opposition because of cost, but the Conference Board of Canada says it resulted in a net economic gain for Vancouver of $770 million in one year and its psychological influence seems enormous.

B.C.’s first megaproject was conceived in 1862 when a gold rush that began as placer workings on Fraser River bars found even richer diggings in the distant and remote Interior about 80 kilometres east of present-day Quesnel.

Gold discoveries around what became the boom camp of Barkerville were stupendous. Prospectors were making $525 a day at a time when a day’s work digging coal paid $1.50. The ensuing Cariboo gold rush would utterly change B.C. and shape its economy, its political culture and its social landscapes for the next half century.

Prospective miners, merchants and adventurers who sought a different kind of gold by providing the services that would sustain the gold camps, along with cattle drovers herding livestock to new ranches in the Chilcotin, Cariboo and Okanagan grasslands, all had to struggle through country where the only transportation routes were wild rivers and the trails made by first nations and the fur brigades.

James Douglas, a former Hudson’s Bay Company factor turned colonial administrator, was not a man who thought small. He envisioned a road to the riches that would not only unify British Columbia but would extend all the way to Red River and ultimately connect the western colony to Canada.

So Douglas decided to build a public road to the emerging gold centre of the new colony of B.C. from Yale, where steamboats were blocked by the Fraser Canyon. The Cariboo Wagon Road was subsequently hacked out of canyon walls and steep hillsides, following old fur-trade routes.

The late Vancouver Sun editor emeritus Bruce Hutchison, who travelled portions of the old road by horseback himself, described it as “a fantastic road hanging like gossamer in the canyon, twisting around every rock of the interior plateau, threading the gorges of the mountains, penetrating the last narrow gut of Devil’s Gap, and meandering down at last to the flats by Williams Creek where the gold lay.”

But in the 1860s, the British colonial office was not in favour of the colony borrowing to build a road. There was opposition from a faction of noisy Victoria merchants who wanted to build another route via the mid-coast. Starchy, autocratic Douglas was vilified by the media — New Westminster editor John Robson denounced him as “the arch-enemy of British Columbia.”

Douglas borrowed money anyway, without permission from London. His highway scheme might even be considered the first PPP, a forerunner of public private partnerships. Construction by the Royal Engineers was launched with public money in 1862. When the engineers withdrew from the province in 1863, Douglas hired private contractors and licensed them to recover costs by levying freight tolls.

Soon the project was the epicentre of an uproar over allegations of bribes, kickbacks and political favouritism. But the stagecoaches, muletrains, freight wagons, sojourners and highwaymen cared little for the controversy; a tsunami of commerce commenced.

Douglas retired in 1864. By 1871, when B.C. joined Confederation, road construction accounted for close to 45 per cent of the provincial budget and yet, points out Hutchison in his exhaustive history of the Fraser River, “the economical Scot had left his colony in admirable shape” financially by instigating the road tolls that kept down the public debt.

Among his most important legacies was that first megaproject, the Cariboo Wagon Road. It marked the beginning of everything we now take for granted. It carried people and supplies to B.C.’s previously remote interior, carried the wealth from mines to banks for reinvestment and sparked the boom that created Vancouver, which eclipsed Victoria as the most important city in the province.

“Long after the gold was exhausted, the miners had disappeared and the gold towns had been deserted,” Hutchison wrote, “the road carried the travel of the developing ranch lands, of the new towns and the new mines, of a Canadian province that became one of the richest areas of habitation on the map. The same road, rebuilt and widened, but hardly changed in location, carries that traffic still.”

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